The Rocky may be no more, but the Gazette is very much with us — and looking for a roving reporter:

Gazette.com, in Colorado Springs, is looking for a morning person in our newsroom. Your job: update gazette.com by 7 a.m.; record a quick vodcast with headlines and promos to upcoming coverage; hit the streets and post breaking news throughout the morning; update your blog; then polish selected stories for the Gazette’s print edition. You’ll be mobile and wired, and will have a police scanner and a camera. You need strong reporting and writing skills. You need to be an early technology adopter, able to pick up on new and better ways to get the news you report to your readers, wherever they may be and through whatever channel they prefer. This is critical: readers will not come to you; your job is to go to them. You need dependable wheels. We’ll give you the tools and space you need to make the beat your own, and to let your personality and authority shine through. Journalism degree or relevant related experience required. Send letter, resume, clips to managing editor Larry Ryckman: larry.ryckman@gazette.com. See us at gazette.com; on Facebook (colorado springs gazette), and Twitter (csgazette).

Well, that sounds like a day’s work and then some. When I was a sprout pounding out the word count for what was then called the Gazette Telegraph, in the late Seventies, it was not uncommon to write a half-dozen pieces a day, massage a few rewrites and then go out and get good and drunk. We were often both mobile and wired, but not in a strictly professional — or even marginally functional — sense.

Happily, that was then, and this is now. Anyone who’s charging around 21st-century Bibleburg with a backpack full of esoteric electronica, grilling the brass as to why the troops dick around with C4 during red-flag warnings and otherwise making themselves unwelcome between Twitter tweets, Facebook postings, website updates and hard-copy journalism is liable to find the pubs shuttered come quitting time — assuming he or she can afford a few glasses of ale on what the G is willing and able to pay in this market.

I think I’ll stick to cycling journalism. I don’t have to teach a seminar on Open Records 101 to any uniformed governmental dysfunctionaries on a daily basis, I can work in my skivvies, and the ‘fridge full of ale is only a few shorts steps away. Say, it must be 5 o’clock somewhere, don’t you think?

I know, I know, print is dead. But it’s one thing to say it, and another to see the actual corpse. The Rocky Mountain News died today, just a couple months shy of its 150th birthday, and even those of us who are more pixel-pushers than ink-stained wretches should pause to pay our respects.

The first daily I ever worked for, the Colorado Springs Sun, died under similar circumstances, the weaker of two publications in what had become a one-newspaper town. The Gazette murdered the Sun, then burned the body and scattered the ashes. And today, no Bibleburger under a certain age knows that the Sun ever lived at all.

My thoughts are with the men and women of the Rocky as they take those first hesitant steps on an even rockier road, the one that leads to the unemployment office.

I have a lot of time on the job, and have spent way too many hours of what we all know to be a finite lifespan, Jimmy Dobson aside, explaining to outraged citizens that news is what happens — it’s neither good, nor bad, it’s what happens (and oh, yeah, the bad news gets more eyeballs).

Even so, this selection from today’s Bibleburg Gazette has me thinking about relocating to Mars:

Babe dies of suspected abuse; sailor father back in custody

Officials: Army suicides at 3-decade high

Report: 3 calls before police get frozen body

Soldier accused in woman’s killing faces new charge

Colorado man accused of threatening to kill Obama

I spared you the links. There’s probably plenty of equally grim news in your neighborhood. But probably nothing as depressing as 587 pounds of weed ending up in the hands of the fuzz after some dipshit in an SUV stacked it on I-25 near Walsenburg.

I got pulled over there back in ’72, in the early morning hours, with 10 pounds of ditch weed in a brown paper bag parked on the back seat of a 1964 Chevy Biscayne, and I was back in that cop car entertaining those good gentlemen with my cocaine-enhanced wit before you could say boo. A wise guy with an eye toward the statute of limitations might say that the greatly amused audience demonstrated its brand-new radar gun, accepted a gratuity and let the miscreant go. But I’ve never been smart.

From our Better Late Than Never Dept: The NFL says requests for media credentials for this weekend’s Super Bowel are down for the first time in recent memory. According to Joe Strupp at Editor & Publisher, two major dailies — the Atlanta journal-Constitution and the Hartford Courant — are not sending anyone to what is arguably the most boring game of this or any season, which is really saying something when it comes to American “football.” And The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Dallas Morning News all are sending fewer staffers than in previous years, probably because all three have fewer staffers, period.

Says Chris Vivlamore, AJC pro sports editor, “Part of it is the cost and we want to do more local stories.” Good on you, Chris. How about taking a stab at covering something that hasn’t already been beaten to death on TV — like, uh, say, bicycle racing?

Meanwhile, here’s an interesting piece from American Journalism Review: Robert Hodierne catches up with a few ex-newsies to ask, “Is there life after newspapers?”